Attracting Beneficial Insects to Your Garden

Gardening is a favorite pastime for many people. It can be incredibly satisfying to see your garden go from the starting stages all the way up to producing beautiful, full-grown plants. Achieving success with your garden will take some time and you’ll need to watch out for many pitfalls along the way. One of the most common problems people deal with is insects eating their plants.

Beneficial Insects

Having an insect infestation in your garden is definitely no fun. They can ruin your plants and prevent things from growing as well as they should. It’s important to realize that not all insects are bad for your garden, though. There are a number of insects that could be beneficial to have around for various reasons.

Attracting beneficial insects to your garden area is a great idea when you want to promote a positive environment for your plants. These good insects are capable of eating the bad ones, chasing away the problem that plagues your garden with relative ease. If you’re new to gardening, then you may not have any clue about how you can begin attracting these sorts of bugs to your garden. It isn’t too difficult; as long as you take a look at the following tips, you’ll be able to turn the insect situation in your garden around completely.

Know Your Insects

Before starting out, it’s important to note that you need to know your insects fairly well. If you don’t have any idea which of the insects are going to be helpful for your yard and which will be harmful, then you’ll never get anywhere. You don’t want to accidentally start killing the bugs that are helping your cause. Learn to identify the insects that have positive benefits for your garden and only actively seek to eliminate the bad ones.

Make Sure They Have Access to Water

You may not think about it much but insects need water just as much as any other living creature does. If you want these good insects to be able to live in your garden area, then they’re going to need to have plenty of access to water. This doesn’t involve something as obtuse as leaving out bowls of water but you should make use of your sprinkler system. Watering your garden and lawn should create enough puddles for the good insects to be able to get a drink when they need it.

Place Rocks and Mulch

A significant chunk of the good insects that you want to attract will not simply exist out in the open. They prefer to hide in little safe spaces where they can carve out their niche. Having things in your gardens such as rocks or stepping stones gives these bugs places they can feel safe. Mulch is also fantastic for attracting good insects as they love to burrow into the mulch and live there.

Put in Plants That Attract Good Insects

This is a very sensible step to take when you want good insects to come to your yard. Planting different plants that those insects like will draw them to your yard very quickly. This way, they will be able to deter the bad insects from getting to your other plants. You can create a sort of barrier using this method to keep your garden safe.

Having the perimeter of your garden lined with these plants that attract the good insects is a smart idea. It’s a simple step you can take to ensure that your garden will stay safe from the bad bugs. It won’t take long to do and many of the plants you’ll be using for the perimeter are beautiful in their own right. They’ll make an excellent addition to your garden for both reasons of beauty and practicality.

Another method some people like to use is mixing the plants that attract good bugs sporadically throughout the garden. Essentially, this will have a similar impact to the garden environment as the perimeter method. Instead of creating a line of these plants, you’ll plant them intermittently along with any vegetables you’re trying to grow and other plants. Whichever technique you decide to use should give you positive results.

Avoid Using Pesticides

In order to get rid of the bad bugs in a garden, many people wind up turning to spraying different pesticides. This isn’t the best course of action to take for several reasons. These pesticides can be very harmful to the insects that hurt your plants but they will also kill the good insects too. You can actually wind up hurting the overall diversity of your garden by spraying the pesticide.

Getting rid of the insects you don’t want to have around naturally is much smarter. By simply letting nature run its course, you will be able to let the good insects prey on the undesirables. Your garden will be healthier and happier when you go this route instead. Learning to swear off pesticides is something every gardener should at least consider.

Don’t Use Bug Zappers

If you’ve been using a bug zapper to deter mosquitoes from hanging around your yard, it would be best to stop using it. Bug zappers are a popular method for killing certain insects but they will also cause harm to the bugs you want to keep in your garden. It’s often the case that the positive insects wind up being killed by the bug zapper more often than the ones you wish to eliminate. For this reason, avoid using a bug zapper anywhere on your property for the sake of the good bugs.

Try to Attract Bees

You should attempt to attract bees into your garden if possible. Bees are great for keeping your plants pollinated and healthy. They provide a vital function in nature and will be a big boon to your gardening efforts. You can attempt to provide potential habitats for the bees and place them around your garden. Putting some holes in pieces of wood and having those sit around your garden is often enough to get them to settle there.

Conclusion

There are so many ways you can attract beneficial insects to your garden. Simply using a few of these tips should provide you with great results. If you make use of all of them, then you’ll be sure to have the best gardening experience possible. Learning to nourish the bugs that can help your garden is an important part of giving your plants the best environment possible.Follow my blog with Bloglovin

Hi, I’m Timothy. For many years I have been running my commercial and residential landscaping business. I have always been very much interested in garden and landscape tools and machinery. In the years I ran my landscaping business I learned a lot about these machines. Now I want to share this knowledge with other people, and this website is the perfect place for it. Read more.

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